Posted on 11/30/2008 6:51:51 AM PST by IbJensen
If there is a dreadfully overused word in the giddy countdown to the Obama inauguration, it is “smart.” Not just “smart,” but also its stronger cousins like “Brilliant” and “Genius.”
These words have been offered shamelessly for nearly every person assigned a role by President-Elect Obama. They are assembling an “all-star cabinet.” This was not an honor for those having attended all the right schools, but a tribute to people who have all the “right” ideas. Liberals are smart because they’re liberals. Conservative beliefs are honed from having been dropped on your head as an infant.
Last week, Newsweek almost comedically compared Obama to Lincoln, hailing the strength of his “humility.” How could anyone stay humble with all these hyper-flattering cover stories about whether you’re Lincoln or you’re Franklin Roosevelt? Nobody asked: But what if he turns out to be another ineffective Jimmy Carter? Then again, not to worry. Just as Time turned Obama into FDR on its cover, they comically projected Carter as Gary Cooper in “High Noon” in the hostage-crisis spring of 1980.
Back in June of 2001, Newsweek headlined an article on an upcoming Bush foreign policy trip with these words: “See George. See George Learn Foreign Policy.” He was painted like a president who couldn’t prove he was smarter than a fifth-grader on TV. Newsweek did attempt a historical comparison. European pols heard Bush advocating missile defense, and one participant joked, “He was like Reagan....without the charisma.” Newsweek concluded school wasn’t working yet for Bush: “Still a student in a most demanding and unforgiving school, he needs all the teachers he can get.”
That dismissive attitude toward Republican politicians will long outlive the Bush presidency, just as it outlasted Reagan’s. Nine days after the election, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denounced Sarah Palin in the snobbiest of tones on NBC’s “Today” as someone who should “be going into a kind of policy Berlitz course, which one would think would be a relatively sound thing to do.” Plugging Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, NBC’s Matt Lauer added the colorful tale that Jackson threatened to kill his own vice president, so Meacham caustically added, “I don’t know if Senator McCain has thought that along the way.”
Meanwhile, Newsweek’s writers are exploring the inspiring depths of humility of their blessed Barack: “Obama has unusual detachment for a politician. He observes himself as a kind of figure out of literature.” Does that sound humble? Or does it sound astoundingly arrogant? Reagan living in his own movies put him in Fantasy Land, but Obama seeing himself as the Embodiment of Hope on the library shelf is somehow grounded. The Obama-crazed media are hallucinating.
On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” co-host Robin Roberts couldn’t stop gushing about the Obama cabinet picks: “Some would say it’s a team of rivals, a la President Lincoln, or is a better comparison a team of geniuses as FDR did?” George Stephanopoulos unsurprisingly agreed: “We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes.”
Smelling salts all around, please.
If this proposed incoming Obama administration wasn’t so stuffed with Clintonites, starting with Hillary, that line might have sounded insulting to Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago, all these same tributes were being offered to Bill Clinton’s superior intelligence, Bill Clinton’s grace under pressure, and a superior incoming Clinton staff. Even Stephanopoulos was ogled back then over the charisma of his “power whisper.”
But looking back, how well did Bill Clinton display a foreign policy genius that made the world a less violent place? Are the mass murders in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica something that every Clinton fan in the media has wiped clean from their brains? Have they all forgotten the Americans killed at the Khobar Towers, or aboard the U.S.S. Cole, our lost diplomats at the embassies of Kenya and Tanzania? Did the overflowing international compassion of Clinton melt the hearts of al-Qaeda into retirement? Why, then, does every media liberal assume that History will open her arms and beckon Obama forward as an early entry into the Pantheon of Presidential Greatness?
Conservatives and Republicans have a very important role to play now in holding this alleged Team of Geniuses accountable. This disgraceful “news” media won’t, period. They will line up to serve Obama only slightly less explicitly than Chris Matthews, who typically blurted out that his new job as a television host was to insure President Obama’s success. We say “blurted out” because Matthews tends to...blurt. But give him credit for one thing: the courage to admit the attitude of servitude that his colleagues so piously deny.
Whenever you look upon that smug countenance of Obomba you see an arrogant exterior that cloaks a simple-minded Marxist who hates this country and is ashamed of the fact that he was born in Kenya.
He'll be your president, and Maya Angelou will read a poem at inauguration and those of us who see this as a horrible and egregious error will feel like thowing up.
the one I love is "scary smart."
It’s the old Mutual Admiration Society... New York, Washington, LA group think... mesmerized by their own anticipation and desires. Or, as the Big O has said already, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
LIBERAL=SOCIALIST.
Well. That is impressive. I had no idea someone (even George) could kissazz that much in just one sentence.
Any sane Christian would insist that his faith teaches him that there was only ONE Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Obama does not tell people to stop calling him a messiah, so we are left with this situation
Obama is insane or Obama is a non-Christian.Obama and his cohorts insist he is a Christian, so....they are telling us he is insane.
“liberalism=genius?”
so say the liberals.
but, if they are so brilliant, wouldn’t they have already found a substitute for the oil they hate so much?; how about a cure for cancer, and aids, and heart disease and hunger and all disease? what about poverty and racism and the seven deadly sins? and what about the fannie mae and freddy mac problems? and what about ingrown toe nails and illiteracy and drug addiction?
after so many decades of brilliant, intellectual, all-knowing, compassionate, magnanimous libaralism, shouldn’t we now have paradise on earth? or is it that liberal “brilliance” is being dedicated to eradicating capitalism, the cancer of the ages?
there’ll be lots of “social justice” coming from “brilliant” liberalism in the next four years along with a whole bunch of arrogance that comes from abuse of power.
IMHO
Even my 12 year old, just started youth group daughter, upon hearing people use the term Messiah in reference to Obama said “Isn’t that against the Bible to say that about a person?”
Yep, children in Sunday School know more than the average American.
The depth of Obama’s humility is only exceeded by my own grace in doing high leaps in ballet...I am 64, white haired, six four in height and weigh 270 plus and the closest I come to dancing is splitting hickory logs with a nine pound mall which I swing with exquisite power and precision.
The objectivity of the media.
As far back as I remember - let’s see, according to the media:
Kennedy was brilliant, a genius;
Johnson - probaly the ony democrat not lionized for his intellect. But that was Vietnam;
Nixon - moderately smart but pure evil;
Ford - a buffoon;
Carter - “perhps the most briliant president we’ve ever had” (I personally remember such quotes and they were constant);
Reagan - “an amiable dunce”;
Bush 1 - out of touch, malapropist;
Clinton - brilaint, an “IQ of 186(!)” (sure);
GW - “perhaps the dumbest president we’ve ever had”;
Obama - ......
See a pattern here?
Intelligence has hardly anything to do with whether one is a liberal. Carl Sagan, whose genius in astronomy was legend, was a liberal.
It has more to do with common sense. I've seen many highly intelligent people who didn't have a lick of sense. Most of them were my college instructors, but some are in the media, for instance Joseph L. Galloway.
Liberals don't live in our world, aka: "Reality" and they don't "think", they "feel".
Liberals live in some psychotic utopian fantasy land where the Beatles 'Strawberry Fields' is a real place and Lucy IS in the sky with diamonds.
It has tangerine trees and marmalade skies with cellophane flowers of yellow and green, where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies. There's plasticine porters with looking glass ties and girls with kaleidoscope eyes.Liberals are nuts.
the one I love is “scary smart.”
A president who thinks he is so smart that he arrogantly overlooks what he doesn’t don’t know IS scary!
“It’s not what we don’t know that’s the problem, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” Chalk that up to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, who cares? It’s a brilliant insight.
It takes a peculiar kind off genius to actually look at the historical record of FDR’s handling of the Great Depression and then announce it’s time to dust off some of those old policies and try them again! FDR’s signature achievement was a massive increase in the size and scope of government. Whereas a plethora of non-profit, religious and other organizations of civil society had previously assisted families faced by unemployment or basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter when circumstances warranted, FDR succeeded in creating a government of “first resort” rather than “last resort.” Americans started looking to government as the palliative to concerns about economic security. That’s exactly why Social Security was given its name.
75 years later, the chickens are coming home to roost. By crowding out private sector institutions that might otherwise been expected to provide for retirement income and medical expenses, government effectively has swapped the political insecurity that arises as taxpayers, foreign borrowers and future retirees contemplate whether government with a built-in proclivity to over-promise and under-fund can be relied on to meet its promises to retirees (resulting in massive economy-crippling tax increases) or will renege on them by slashing SS benefits by 27% starting in 2042 or by cutting payments to Medicare providers such that Medicare beneficiaries start experiencing the same difficulties in locating a provider willing to take them as their counterparts relying on Medicaid do in some states.
Only a genius of the left could look at our $1 trillion investment in a war for Iraqi freedom and declare it a failure, yet in another breath look at the $7 trillion we’ve invested in the War on Poverty since it was declared by LBJ 3 decades ago and conclude that we should be spending MORE on the latter!
Put a different way, we have more than 3 decades of solid scientific evidence about just how little we have achieved from the War on Poverty [Headline: Federal Government Spends $7 Trillion to Reduce Poverty by 0.2 Percentage Points!], yet we had a Democrat nominee for president who could say with a straight face to Joe the Plumber that “everyone benefits” from spreading the wealth. It probably DOES require some sort of genius to say things that foolish and not be held to account by voters or the MSM.
That Russell quote is going into my Keeper file.
When is America going to find out that this man is just a bunch of cliches with a pretty face?
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